Cassandra Voices

Category: Uncategorized

  • Himself and the Little People

    That summer of 1974 for the first time in my young life I felt proud of myself. For after one very hard week of sweat work, I stood admiring my big bank of black Tore bog turf drying in the hot sun. It was a great feeling and no one was mocking me now. Little Paddy, my uncles, cousins, and neighbours were delighted for me as I had one and one half lorry loads of good black turf, soon ready for sale. At £45 per lorry load I worked out I had £70 of turf for sale that was a lot of money for a fourteen-year-old boy in 1974.

    I stood admiring my own bank of turf and I really did wonder what little Paddy had said a week earlier. « Nicky, the little people have been very good to me, and they will be good to you. » He said it in such a factual way, that it remained in my mind. Little did I know what the following week held in store for me. This is a little bit of magic that was life growing up in the great land of Ireland. You saw magic working in the very middle of disaster.

    One week later, unusually, I was at home on the day my uncle John landed at our cottage on his bicycle. I saw the concern upon his face. Nicky lad, Tore bog is on fire and it is heading right towards your bank of turf. I’m sorry to tell you, but you will never manage to draw it all out to the road in time. Yoke up your ass and cart. Get down there and rescue what you can. Good luck to you, and Nicky, be careful.

    Ned the Ass galloped with meself in the cart the three miles to Tore bog like a bat out of hell. I could see the thick smoke rising on the horizon. My heart sank as I arrived at the bank of now dry turf and saw the flames and smoke of the bog fire, hundreds of metres away but approaching fast.

    Well if I thought I sweat cutting this bank of turf, the following four hours will remain with me for as long as I live. As hard as I was able to, I filled that cart with turf using a beet fork and drawing it fifty metres to the safety of the old gravel boreen. Ned the Ass and meself worked spontaneously. Gently coaxed, he was a fine strong and loyal friend to me. We worked like we were possessed till we had almost all of that turf out upon the gravel boreen, and the fire now but on top of us.

    What happened next has made little Paddy’s words very special to my heart, for I cannot explain what occurred. About the fifth or sixth last load to remove the bank slipped and the cart load of turf went into a small dry bog hole. It was about 60 degrees to Ned who was half on the bank and half in the bog hole with the cart. Terrified, I broke off a Sally stick and for the first time in my life I came down hard on the struggling ass’s back. I hit him as hard as I could, roaring at him, « Come up Ned ! Come up ! » I was desperately trying to save his life. He was trapped very badly. I realized he couldn’t make it back up with only the strength of his his two front legs, and the chains that held him into the cart had near half a tonne of pressure upon them. I had never known a more desperate situation and I felt totally lost. In my frustration I roared out, « Please God don’t allow Ned to die in front of my eyes! This is not his fault, it is mine ! Please help me! »

    The following twenty minutes is like a blur. As if my actions were taken over by a strength superior to my own, I jumped into the bog hole and dug out a hole in the soft peat. Enough to burrow my body through till the breach of my back was against the tailboard and I began to heave. I could feel vessels bursting in my head as I heaved, and heaved. I blacked out and I don’t remember a thing till I came around up on top of the bank. Ned was standing looking at me as much to say, « Phew, that was close. Come on let’s get out of here. » There was smoke everywhere.

    Till this day I cannot properly recount what occurred in those blistering moments. It was beyond myself. My back never fully got better, but it’s a small price to pay, because it would have tormented me my whole life if I had lost poor ole Ned. I hope in reading this story you may understand the magic of the old people and the land of Ireland.

  • The Conman and Correspondence with Kurt Vonnegut

    I admire old people who live by their wits, like the ancient American, a real estate man, whom I met in Galway years. He wore a badge on his lapel with the slogan:

    OLD AGE AND CUNNING WILL ALWAYS DEFEAT YOUTH AND TALENT.

    He told me he was eighty. He looked sixty. We had some laughs.

    As well as that real estate man and my pig-breeding Granda, I admire the old conman I encountered in Montreal railway station in 2003.

    He was elderly, frail, perspiring. He approached me at 8.00am as I queued for the transcontinental train. He had a worn telephone directory in his hands.

    ‘Excuse me, sir. Can you help? I’ve lost my reading glasses, can’t make out this telephone book. Prints too small. Ya know what that street outside is called? I think there’s a branch of my bank there.’

    ‘Afraid not. I’m just visiting’

    ‘Ah.’

    He surveyed the other prospective passengers, rejected them and turned back to me.

    “I’m from outa town too. Been playing poker here all weekend and lost my shirt. Can’t even pay the left luggage fee. I’m trying to ring my bank but they don’t answer. I probably got the wrong number. Sir, can you find it here, the First Bank of Montreal? D’you mind ringing it for me?’

    I found the number, abandoned my luggage to the next person in the queue and followed him to the booth. As I dialed the number he prattled urgently.

    ‘What am I gonna do? I’m in deep shit if I can’t get to my bank.’

    There was no reply from the number. Then I remembered.

    ‘It’s Monday,’ I told him sympathetically, ‘Queen Victoria day, a bank holiday.’

    He was shattered. My heart went out to him. But he had an inspiration.

    ‘Sir, could you lend me a coupla dollars so I can get my luggage back. I always leave some cash in it, my fare home. I’ll pay you back in five minutes. Or maybe, hey, look, this watch I won a while back. It’s a Rolex. Worth five hundred dollars. I’m desperate. I’ll give it you for a hundred.’

    He pulled the watch off, pushed it into my hand. I shook my head. He then struggled with a gleaming ring on his finger.

    ‘This is my wedding ring. 14 carat. My wife will be mad but I gotta get home.’

    I realised it was a con, the jewellery was rubbish, but I was admiring his technique. An old man, still a consummate actor: the sweaty forehead, fogged glasses, shaky hands, lines delivered with perfect timing, especially the question that established me as a stranger to Montreal. I love actors. I took the cheap Woolworth’s watch and ring as souvenirs, gave him thirty dollars. When he skedaddled, effusively grateful, I checked that my luggage was intact, thanked its minder and reported the incident to a couple of Mounties in the station. I told them I was glad to reward the old actor’s performance but was worried that some kind old lady who couldn’t afford thirty dollars might also be conned. The Mounties laughed and said they’d look out for the man, but it was needle in haystack time.

    Several times, on the three-day train journey to Edmonton, I took out the cheap watch and ring and wondered what kind of fool parts with his money as easily as I did. On balance I decided my largesse was the equivalent of a cheap theatre ticket on Broadway and the real life performance was quite as absorbing.

    ‘a mere political bauble’

    I shared the 3-day train journey with American pensioners availing of the cheap rate of exchange between Canada and the USA. I still thought of him, that old survivor. I also tried to figure out my real motive. Was I afraid to call his bluff, break the illusion he had constructed? Did I want his role to be real? Am I incurably gullible? Do I still prefer illusion to reality? Why do I think losers are the real winners?

    Another old man I encountered was Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), author of Slaughterhouse 5, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, PlayerPiano and many other masterpieces which were resolutely anti-war. He never earned a Nobel peace prize which is the reason I have always regarded that Prize as a mere political bauble. However, on November 11, 1999, the writer’s birthday, an asteroid was discovered and named in his honour. It was called 25399 Vonnegut. Kurt’s consolation prize is located in the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, circling the sun every 4 years 2 months approximately.

    Vonnegut was a foot soldier against Germany in the second World War and was a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was bombed. Subsequently he wrote anti-war books. A Hollywood producer once told him he might as well write anti-avalanche books.

    Vonnegut was proud of his German ancestry.

    Kurt Correspondence

    In June, 2003 I found his address in New York and wrote a note to him:

    22.6.03

    Dear Mr. Vonnegut,

                                        I finally got this address from Bill Keough – I hope it’s the right one.

                                        This is just to say thank you for all of the encouragement – apart from the entertainment – you have provided for me over the years. I still re-read your books when I’m down. Then I can laugh and cry again.

                                        I wish they’d given the Nobel Peace Prize to the ‘old fart who smokes Pall Mall’ (as you describe yourself) or the man who invented the Church of God the Totally Disinterested or even to your marvellous invention, Kilgore Trout. Instead they give it to poets who sentimentalize, and scientists without the humility of your late brother (Pointing to his own head: “You should see what its like in here”)

                                        You are a treasure who keeps us on the brink of sanity – especially boring old fart-fathers like me who try to subvert my six kids with your ideas.

                                        .

                                        Go raibh míle maith agat.

                                        Very Sincerely yours

                                        Bob Quinn

                To my astonishment a couple of months later I received a postcard. On its front was the slogan: LIFE IS NO WAY TO TREAT AN ANIMAL. Written in block capitals on the back was:

                                                                    AUG. 29TH 2003

    DEAR BOB – I ALREADY OWED A LOT TO AN IRISHMAN BEFORE MY LIFE WAS SAVED BY YOUR LETTER, NAMELY G.B. SHAW.

    A NOBEL PRIZE TURNS THE WINNER’S BRAINS TO TAPIOCA, BUT LIKE JAMES JOYCE I SURE COULD USE THE MONEY.

             CHEERS

    (There was a self-portrait signed K.V. – 80 AS OF 11/11/02)

     

    Dear Kurt,                                                                              24/9/03

                            Thank you for taking the trouble to reply to my simple fan letter and especially for inscribing an original self-portrait. I now have the perfect bookmark for, of course,‘Cats Cradle’ which I have just begun again. I have also started smoking my pipe again (so it goes).

                            In my youth I read a line from ‘The Virginian’: “When you say that, smile”.

                I hope not too late I realise that this is your principal device, why you are what they call a genius and I am an ordinary crank: you – like Shaw – detail the most horrifying paradoxes about us, but with a rueful grin. By contrast, I am still into the anatomy of melancholy – my adolescent complexes will never be resolved, I hope. They’ve kept me going this far.

                Anyway, the sheer craft of your work will always keep it fresh; its audacity still makes me pause and exhale slowly. How did he do THAT, I ask.

                I have 13 years to catch up on you, in which to achieve your state of karass ( a nice version of grace) and to grin. I shall send you a birthday card for all of your next, many, eleventh of the eleventh anniversaries; it will be easy to remember, as my own window opened on the fourteenth of the eleventh.

                At the very least, sir, I share that dangerous characteristic with you: a Scorpio.

                God Bless you Mr. Rosewater.          

     

                Dear Kurt                                                                                           27th April 05

    As your next birthday card I am taking the liberty of portraying you as the deus ex machina in my new novel, one of a series of unpublishable fictions. I feel like your invention Kilgore Trout whose work ended up in pornographic books.

                I have placed you in a country called Ishkailand, a tiny, glacier-bound Republic which has a superabundance of mountain water. A bit like Ireland. This has made it rich in a dying, thirsting planet whose desalination plants have rusted because the oil has run out. The tiny country, location of OWEC (Organisation of Water Producing Countries) conferences, is nominally run by a failed poet/President who has a wife, the rejected daughter of a vile mountaineer goatherd who is going to precipitate an avalanche which will destroy the country – but I run ahead of myself.

                You are posing as a shabby old tramp but are in reality a wandering writer -you’ve discovered that writing, like crime, has only a tiny pension of satisfaction and have abandoned it for the quiet relief of painting pictures of edelweiss. But you are also a scholar and student of the Ishkailite aboriginal language – and I am not sure yet whether you will save this world and its people or say, the hell with them all.

    Is that okay with you?

    At this moment in the chaotic narrative, you are getting blotto with your exact contemporary the goat-herd father-in law who, like you, fought at Anzio, and you are both having a ball.

    Your fictional persona’s diagnosis of the planet’s problems is simply ‘a stack-up of tolerances’.

    That is the story so far – 60 pages! You have only yourself to blame. I hope to have it ready for your next birthday which will be three days before my 70th. I think they call it a festchrift.

    God save all here!

     

                                                                                            5/5/05

    HAPPY TO HAVE YOUR ADDRESS WHICH YOU FAILED TO INCLUDE IN YOUR PREVIOUS AND MOST STRIKINGLY FRIENDLY COMMUNIQUE. USE MY NAME OR IMAGE HOWEVER YOU PLEASE IN YOUR NEW NOVEL. I NEVER SUED ANYBODY AND NEVER WILL.

    LOVE!

              (signed with self-portrait and ‘82 as of 11/11/04’

    I next sent him a copy of a book of mine that was actually published: Maverick.

                                                                                    3.6.05

    I AM ENJOYING YOUR BOOK, AND KNOWING SOMETHING ABOUT YOU, AND BEMUSED AS WELL BY ITS TITLE, WHICH IS OF ALL THINGS THE NAME OF A TEXAN WHO DID NOT BRAND HIS CATTLE.

                                                      CHEERS! KV

     

    6/5/05

    DEAREST IRAQ:

    ACT LIKE ME. AFTER 100 YEARS OF DEMOCRACY LET YOUR SLAVES GO. AFTER 150 LET YOUR WOMEN VOTE. AT THE START OF DEMOCRACY ETHNIC CLEANSING IS QUITE OK.

    LOVE YOU MADLY!

    UNCLE SAM

     

    11th May 05

    Dear Kurt

                            This evening at dinner I was trying to impress my latest wife, who is 26 years younger than me and runs the world, by showing her your latest treasured postcard. She is also a fan.

                ‘Note’, I said, ‘Vonnegut has never been invited to ‘Cúirt’, that Galway mecca for international literary figures like Heaney, Proulx , Coetzee etc etc.’.

    ‘Cúirt is into people who are fashionable’, she said. ‘Why don’t we cut through the literary shit and get him to deliver a keynote address at the Fleadh.’

    She runs the Galway Film Fleadh, the only down-to earth-film festival in the world.

    ‘You could show the film ‘Breakfast of Champions’ which was an honest attempt’, I ventured.

    ‘Whatever’, she said. ‘Get him to deliver his anti-Bush onslaught. Film makers need shaking up. We’ll bring him here, put him up in luxury, give him a good time. Persuade him to come’

    ‘What about his photographer wife’, I asked.

    ‘We’ll look after her. She’ll protect him from fools’ she said.

    ‘What about me?’ I asked.

    ‘She’ll protect him from you, too.’

    So, Mr. Trout, there it is: an invitation. The Galway Film Fleadh is on from the 5th to the 10th of July (this year too). Have you ever visited Galway in the west of the country called Ireland, this figment of the American imagination?

                Mit besten gruessen

    14/5/05

    IT IS WIDELY CONCEDED THAT IRISH PERSONS ARE THE MOST MELODIOUS AND INTRICATE AND AMUSING SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. SO A GERMAN-AMERICAN APPEARING BEFORE YOU WOULD BE A DANIEL IN THE LIONS’ DEN. ALSO, I AM TOO EFFING OLD. BUT THANKS

    Kurt Vonnegut

    On the 26th May Kurt sent me a signed copy of ‘POEMS WRITTEN DURING THE FIRST FIVE MONTHS OF 2005’.

    One of his poems was titled Naptown, USA

    It was alright there in Indianapolis

    Where I was born:

    Jazz and serious music, law, journalism,science,

    Good food and jokes, sports, politics,

    Architecture, libraries, institutions of higher learning,

    People so smart I couldn’t believe it

    People so dumb I couldn’t believe it

    People so nice I couldn’t believe it

    People so mean I couldn’t believe it

    But for some reason

    I had to get out of there.

    The cost?

    At 82 I am a homeless man.

     

    3rd June 05

    Dear Kurt,

                After your ‘too effing old’ card I lapsed into contemplation of my own mortality.

                Now your 2005 poems have arrived and have dragged me kicking and screaming with laughter back to life. If you can keep on keeping on so acutely so can I – minus the brilliance, of course. Thank you. I can now continue writing.

                As you won’t be visiting, here are some images to show you what you are missing – a place not long and narrow like Chile – but I must say that its equally interesting living on an island shaped like a little puppy, begging on its hindlegs. Trouble is, to find the positive images and experiences illustrated, you have to go through a lot of touristic rubbish as well as increasingly draconian immigration barriers (unless you’re white) – rather like the reason I refuse to go back to the USA: ploughing through groups of fat, expressionless security people who approach me on the assumption I’m a geriatric suicide bomber.

                A late friend of mine, Reggie Howard (who had his brains dislodged in the back of a warplane in WW2, held them in with his hand and achieved Ripley’s Believe it or Not fame by surviving thus far ) told me that at the age of 68 he had laid an 18-year-old (female). This was my ambition until I passed that watershed last year and now all I can hope for is an encounter appropriate to my present age, 69, which mightn’t be a bad substitute. These giggly and desperate thoughts are suggested by your latest work – which gift has flattered and delighted me.

                What encourages me is that you are still highlighting our absurdity. I am accustomed to people of advancing age adopting an attitude of resigned hopelessness equivalent to the pragmatic despair of the young. Maybe the latter is a function of a small population like ours, whereas no matter what one’s opinion, there seems to be still room – and an audience – for anarchic thought over in Uncle Samland. Okay, Monkeyface ignores it, but it hasn’t gone away. And won’t, I hope, for a very long time.

                Wer schreibt, bleibt.

     

    14.7.05

    YOUR PRAISE OF ME DID NOT FALL ON DEAF EARS.

    LOVE –

    (Self-portrait)

    GIFT COMING!

     

    He sent me one of his paintings which featured the lone, framed word ‘sleep’ where the ‘S’ was elongated into a curving serpent. He signed it with his usual cartoon self-portrait and the words: ‘For the writer Bob Quinn, my best friend among the living.’ Never losing his sense of humour and irony, he was old enough to have seen most of his real friends die.

    28.Aug. 05

    Dear Kurt,

                            I enclose a book of pictures, the exhibition of which I just opened with words that include passing reference to you. This is becoming a habit.

                            Since our last communication I’ve been busy reading your oeuvre: Bagombo Snuff Box out of the library in Galway, read all the stories and felt like an archaeologist excavating the origins of your enormous talent. My favourites are Thanatos and 2BR02B but I enjoyed them all and saw how your agents persuaded you to tailor the ends to middle American ‘fifties taste, but leaving sharp prescient stings in various tails all around you.

                In Dublin this week I found Hocus Pocus and am getting a great kick out of it.

                I told you before that in the festschrift which I am writing I forced you to become very drunk with a stinking goatherd. I am beginning to suspect this is an uncharacteristic plot turn because I’m having difficulty sobering you up to launch another gentle onslaught on the assembled suits. They remind you of the 1950’s Berlin Congress of Culture at which Arthur Koestler spoke and which transpired to have been financed covertly by the CIA. (Note: The CIA also bought up a million copies of Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon’ and distributed them, free, throughout the world. That’s how best-sellers are made) I think I can sober you up fast this way.

                Your incitement to Sleep is much admired

    The next communication, an illustration of his irony and anger, was a copy of a letter he had sent to the Chicago paper In These Times”:

    TO ‘IN THESE TIMES’

    Dear Editor, If I may impose on your extraordinary hospitality yet again:

    I was on John Stewart’s Daily Show September 13th, and arrived with a compendium of liberal crap I never wanted to hear again, and my responses thereto.

    But I only had six minutes, and so never got a chance to read them aloud. For whatever they may be worth to you:

    “Give us this day our daily bread”    

    Sure. I’ll pay for it. Enjoy!

    “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”  

    Oh Yeah? Anybody trespasses on me, and I’ll cut him a new you-know-what.

    ‘Blessed are the peace-makers.”  

    Jane Fonda? Give me a break!

    “Love thy enemies.”    

    Arabs?

    Blessed are the meek.”  

    You bet! I love ‘em, too. I tell ‘em to kiss my ass, and they’ll kiss it.

    “No man can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”  

    Mammon , of course, is the god of greed and riches. And the hell I can’t serve both God and Mammon. Look at Pat Robertson! He’s as happy as a hog up to its ears in excrement!

                                                   

    (signed) Kurt Vonnegut.

                                                                                        10/9 05

    also

    12.10.05

    WE ARE A DISEASE SO, LIKE SYPHILIS WITH A CONSCIENCE, WE SHOULD STOP REPRODUCING.

    KV

    On the 1st of December Kurt sent me a Merry Christmas card consisting of a self-portrait drawn in silver paint on plastic. I sent him a dvd of my Romanian Quartet film documentary.

                                                                                        11th Sep. 06!!

    DEAR BOB:

    I LOOKED FORWARD TO BEING DELIGHTED BY YOUR VIDEO. BUT WHEN IT TRIED TO PLAY IT THESE WORDS APPEARED ON THE SCREEN: “DUE TO REGIONAL LIMITATIONS THIS CANNOT BE SHOWN.

    MY HEART IS BROKEN.

                                                    (Self-portrait, complete with tear)

               

    Dear Kurt,

    ‘I’ve got tears in my ears from lying on my back and crying over you.’

              I am more heartbroken than you especially as the DVD worked for two old pals in Missouri and NY city.

              I’ve spoken harshly to the Dublin copying studios and they explained thusly:

              The DVD will play on any computer anywhere but not on every TV set. A difference between old fashioned Europe and the good old USA is we can play American films on our TV sets but you can’t play ours on your sets unless the latter are dual capacity PAL /NTSC Tv sets.

    Ours are, yours aren’t. I presume its to stop our decadent frenchfried ideas flourishing over there.

              All I can suggest is asking one of your gracious kids to lend you their computer to look at the film. And I hope you enjoy it.

              Unfortunately I still drink (alcohol and coffee) and smoke like a trooper. However years ago a pretty young German doctor explained her similar bad habits to me as follows: the nicotine narrows your arteries, the coffee thins your blood so it’s a perfect metabolic marriage.

              I’m still trying to find a suitable denouement for your heroic role in my Ishkailand saga.

              My very best wishes to you and your local post office. I thoroughly enjoy the concentrated focus of your postcards. Would that I were so short-winded and long-focussed.

              When this summer I proudly displayed your Sleep etching to an ex-head honcho of United Artists (my wife brings stray dogs like that home sometimes, the type that is impressed by nothing) – he stared and murmured: ‘wow!’

              Your name is good everywhere.

               

    9/6/06

    I had the temerity to send Mr. Vonnegut a copy of my failed novel ‘The Accompanist’. He quoted at least one sentence of it and commented:

    3.9.06

    “I HAD AN IMAGE OF THE UNIVERSE AS ONE GIGANTIC CHORD, FROZEN IN TIME, BUT ACCESSIBLE THROUGH THE HEAT OF HUMAN EMOTION WHICH MELTED DOWN BITS IN THE FORM OF MELODIES, MERE GLIMPSES OF THE IMMENSITY BEHIND THEM.”

                WOW!   You got a major poem in a single senence

                                                                Kurt Vonnegut.

    Dear Kurt,                                                                              4th October 06

               

                To-night I showed your latest postcard to my 19-year-old and my 11-year old and asked them this question: Why would one of the greatest writers of the 20th century take the trouble to write out in block capitals a sentence from my feeble writing and add “WOW!’?

                The younger said: ‘He likes you.’

                The older said: ‘Solidarity.’

                I told them about your son Mark (?) who had various tough times and who told you that life was about helping each other to get through it – whatever it was.

                Then they wandered off to their multifarious activities.

                I mentioned your quote to the young Irishman in Syracuse who wanted to publish a ‘print on demand’ ‘version of ‘The Accompanist’ and he asked me could he put it on the cover and I said ‘Absolutely not, this is personal.’

                So, thank you. It’s about solidarity in our solitudinousness, if there is such a word.

               

    Death

                {{{Reason for over-wroughtness:

                My favourite son-in-law Islem, a 33-year-old French-Tunisian died suddenly on a visit to Lyons, France 10 days ago. I think he literally killed himself working to provide for the future of his wife,my daughter, and kids. We spent a week in Lyons, going through courts for the right to bury him in Ireland, near his wife and kids. His Lyons-based brothers wanted to bury him initially in Tunisia (from which he had escaped, aged 17, to join the French army. Although he was born in France, his father had brought him and the family back to Tunisia to avoid French decadence! Then the brothers wanted him buried in Lyons. My daughter, cool, calm, repressing her emotion (unlike me) won the case and the appeal in her fluent French. The funeral is in Bray, Co. Wicklow to-day.

                I asked a religious Moroccan friend for advice. Today, 10 days late, he sends me the following:

                “In Islam the whole earth belongs to Allah. He can be buried where he dies! ‘The sooner the better’, says the Prophet.”

                That’s a lot of help for a grieving widow.

                It appeared initially to to be a clash of civilisations and religions but ultimately transpired as a miserable pursuit of property. The brothers had their eyes on an apartment he owned in Lyons. There’s no accounting for human behaviour.

    The good news is that two other of Bairbre’s friends, also Muslims, stayed by her side the entire week. I asked them was there any physical danger. They said, we don’t know, but we are on a ‘jihad’ to protect you and your family. And they did.

    The west must learn this other meaning of the word.

    There is good and bad everywhere}}}

               

                God Bless you twofold, Mr. Trout.

    8/10/2006

                SOLIDARITY , OF COURSE, BUT ALSO AWE AT HOW MUCH YOU HAVE GIVEN A GUY MY AGE TO PONDER IN SO SMALL A SPACE.

                            WOW! – (as speech bubble coming from his self-portrait)

                                                                                                               

                                                                                                   

    11/10/06

    YOU PUT A MAJOR POEM IN A SINGLE SENTENCE.

    OK?

                            KV

     

    It was easy to remember his birthday, three days before mine.

    13.11.06

    Happy Birthday to you

    Happy Birthday to you

    Seventeen more await you

    Until we are through.

     

    A few months after my last greeting to him, Kurt Vonnegut fell down a stairway and died from multiple head injuries. I never met him in person. I wrote to his widow.

     

     

    Jill Krementz                                                                                      12.April 2007

    Turtle Bay

    New York

    Dear Jill,

    Forgive the familiarity. I am really sorry to hear about your loss.

    I feel bad too, like a child who has carelessly offended his father who then dies without a word of forgiveness.

    I treasure our occasional correspondence and the picture he sent me. I miss his birthdays and shooting the breeze but am consoled by his magnificent legacy of writing.

    Yours Sincerely

    Bob Quinn

    I received no reply. So it goes.

  • David Cameron and the Origins of Brexit

     

    In 2015 comic Frankie Boyle penned a darkly titled article ‘What if David Cameron is an evil genius?’ Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, Boyle – citing plans to erase the Human Rights Act from U.K. law – wondered whether Cameron was, ‘A shrewd and malevolent psychopath who thinks two moves deeper into the game than any of his opponents?’

    Having secured an overall Conservative majority in the general election earlier that year, Boyle marvelled at how the Prime Minister had ‘managed to set England against Scotland, Scotland against Labour. He had given his enemies the referendums [Alternative Vote 2011, and Scottish Independence 2015] they asked for, and won’, leaving erstwhile coalition partner Nick Clegg ‘looking like one of those terrified mouse faces that you find in an owl pellet.’

    A year on, in 2016, however, aged just forty-nine, David Cameron’s career was effectively over as his boldest gamble failed when the U.K. electorate voted, by a narrow majority, to leave the E.U.. Right-wing Populism had upset a carefully laid plan to rid the Conservative ‘brand’ of visceral Euroscepticism, and maintain a two-track Union to the benefit of trade and commerce. As Cameron admits, the centre-right could not hold.

    Actually Boyle’s closing assessment of Cameron as a ‘sort of bored viceroy engaged in the handover of power from government to corporations’ seems closer to the mark. Really David Cameron seems to be neither a genius nor a psychopath, but instead a recognisable product of a privileged upbringing and an archaic political system – with a skewed democracy running under a first-past-the-post voting system maintaining a ruling centre right consensus, and an ‘unwritten’ constitution bringing uncertainties in an era of regular referendums.

    The personality that emerges in a recently published autobiography For the Record is of a savvy and hard-working insider, lacking in profound insight or deep learning, and beholden to a mercantile outlook as the son of a stockbroker. In another era he might have had a fine career in the East India Company before taking a seat in Parliament to plot imperial escapades.

    This autobiography dangles morsels of gossip from ‘blue on blue’ Conservative feuding – especially with one-time friends, including current Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – but incessant retrospective justification, often with cherrypicked data, makes for a generally tedious, and long, read. Regrets are in terms of tactical choices: anyone expecting that a fall from power would bring profound questioning of the nature of conservatism in the twenty-first century will be disappointed.

    The closing paragraph, in which he spells out advice he will proffer to future prime ministers conveys an essential banality, oddly reminiscent of the adventure books of Captain W. E. Johns, with Cameron assuming the role of Biggles, and George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer his loyal sidekick Algie:

    Whoever they are, I will tell them this. That Britain is the greatest country on earth. Our greatness is derived not from our size, but from our people – their decency, their talent, and that special British spirit. There is no need for new ideology or systems, we have the best one here: democracy. We are lucky that this political system enables politicians to act upon what I think motivates most of them: the national interest and public service. And if you listen hard, beyond the sound and the fury, you will hear that this quiet patriotism and belief in democracy is what unites people too. Remember that as you pick up the baton and lead. I will be willing you on as you do.

    Cameron’s apparently simplistic patriotism – born of faith in the enduring greatness of the British ‘spirit’ – coincided with an avowed ‘little ‘e’ and little ‘s’ ‘euroscepticism.’ This prevarication over Britain’s relationship with Europe played a crucial role in producing a career-defining Brexit. The attempt, and essential failure, to renegotiate a deal with the EU prior to the referendum left an unmistakable impression that EU membership was a relationship of convenience to be borne stoically, involving competing nation-states, rather than one of interdependence and mutual benefit.

    Schooldays and Oxford

    Cameron presents a picture of growing up among a happy, bibulous family including two sisters and one brother, featuring an especially affectionate father-son relationship. This did not, however, prevent him from being packed off to boarding school at the tender age of seven.

    There he recalls: ‘At bath time we had to line up naked in front of a row of Victorian metal baths and wait for the headmaster, James Edwards, to blow a whistle before we got in.’ Punishment he says was, ‘old-fashioned. They included frequent beatings with the smooth side of an ebony clothes brush.’

    Such childhood experiences have long forged ‘the stiff upper lip’ characteristic of the upper strata of British society, with medieval origins in the fostering of noble sons as page boys to aristocratic peers. Over centuries, hardened by emotional suppression in childhood, many among this ruling class have been inured to the suffering of racial and social ‘inferiors’, assuming a combination of hard work and punishment for wrongdoing to be a panacea for societal ills.

    Yet Cameron is clearly no dinosaur of a bygone age in the apparent mould of his fellow Conservative Jacob Rees Mogg, and he includes tender reminiscences of a severely disabled son Ivan, who passed away before he took office in 2009, and an apparently loving relationship with Samantha his wife, to whom the book is dedicated.

    Nonetheless, a residual harshness is evident in his attitude towards crime – with an emphasis on deterrence – and poverty, with frequent allusion to the ‘medicine’ of fiscal measures required to restore the U.K.’s economic fortunes after the Crash of 2007-2008. Work would set the poor free, conveniently to the benefit of a wealthy elite.

    After prep school came Eton College, like his ‘father, grandfather, mother’s father and his father’, where the teenage Cameron had a brush with authority – having been caught smoking pot – before knuckling down sufficiently to gain entry to Brasenose College, Oxford, and later earn a first class degree in oft-derided – by Boris Johnson not least[i] – PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics); incidentally he dismisses the account of what he did with a pig’s head while a member of the Bullingdon Club as ‘false and ludicrous.’

    During his time at Eton Cameron first encountered the economic ideas that have informed his political outlook since the 1990s, when he worked under the right-wing Chancellor Norman Lemont. From the start he says, ‘it was the radical monetarists and free marketeers who seemed to have the new and exciting ideas.’

    This indicates approval for what Naomi Klein describes as the ‘Shock Doctrine’[ii] espoused by Milton Friedman – the idea of using a political crisis to bring budgetary austerity in order to generate conditions favourable to rapid economic growth. Any recovery generally enriches an economic elite, with the consolation of high employment for the wider society, however precarious and poorly paid.

    ‘Compassionate’ Conservatism

    Cameron styles himself a ‘Thatcherist rather than a Thatcherite,’ a distinction appearing to be a branding exercise as opposed to any substantial divergence from the outlook of his predecessor, whose uncompromising policies established a predominantly post-industrial and unequal society reliant on a London-based financial services industry, over the course of eleven seismic years in power between 1979 and 1990.

    He reveals: ‘I wasn’t always convinced by her approach, and thought some of the rough edges needed to come off. But on the big things – trade union reform, rejecting unilateral nuclear disarmament, our alliance with Ronal Reagan’s America, privatization, Europe – she was absolutely right.’ Essentially, Cameron recognized that ironing out “rough edges” would be necessary to make the Conservative Party electable after Tony Blair had shifted New Labour to the political centre ground.

    He even hails the architect of New Labour: ‘Tony Blair was the post-Thatcher leader the British people wanted’ he says, combining, ‘pro-enterprise economics with a more compassionate approach to social policy and public services.’

    Cameron recognised that taking the Thatcherite (or Thatcherist) project any further had become electorally impossible, at least in the short term. In fairness to him, levels of inequality, while remaining significantly higher than other advanced northern European economies,[iii] stabilized rather than widened during his tenure, and universal healthcare through the NHS was maintained.

    Cameron spells out the changes in emphasis he believed were required to make his party electable: ‘Instead of tax cuts, crime and Europe, we needed to shift our focus onto the issues the Conservative Party had ignored: health, education, and tackling entrenched poverty … women and ethnic minorities.’ As Conservative leader from 2005 and Prime Minister from 2010, Cameron embraced non-economic causes such as marriage equality, and made sure to be pictured alongside women and members of ethnic minorities. To some of extent the exercise of ironing out “the rough edges” was assisted further by going into coalition with the Lib-Dems under the ineffectual Nick Clegg in 2010.

    Over the course of his tenure, in close collaboration with his friend George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Cameron rewarded wealth acquisition by reducing the highest rate of income tax from 50 to 40 per cent and slashing corporation tax went from 28 to 17 per cent. He quotes approvingly J.M. Keynes description of the ‘animal spirits’ motivating enterprise, disregarding the altruism often underpinning innovation.

    As with Thatcher’s idea of an ‘Ownership Society’, his government fed aspirations for house ownership through a 2013 ‘Help to Buy’ scheme for council houses, which only seems to have inflated property values while the market was under supplied. An increase in the rate of VAT from 17.5 to 20%, alongside reductions in the welfare budget no doubt impelled many into taking up employment, but much of this was low paid and precarious – with zero hours contracts increasingly the norm. This job insecurity and low pay may account for what is described as the ‘productivity puzzle’ in the U.K. whereby, as of 2018, labour productivity was 18.3% below its pre-downturn trend.[iv]

    Damningly, as of 2018 – two years after he had left office – almost a million-and-a-half were reliant on food banks.[v] Yet his (scary) ‘assessment now is that we didn’t cut enough. We could have done more, even more quickly, as smaller countries like Ireland had done successfully.’

    On Europe, he and his fellow Modernisers that included Boris Johnson ‘were all convinced that the Conservative Party had become, and should remain, a Eurosceptic party’, but that ‘banging on about Europe’ … was damaging.’ Thus, crucially, he refused to tackle the issue head on, and as Prime Minister postured among his European colleagues, insisting on British exceptionalism to the public gallery.

    Environment and the ‘Big Society’

    The rebranding of Conservatism also embraced environmentalism, memorably conveyed through a much-derided photograph of Cameron astride a sledge pulled by huskies inside the Arctic circle, which was intended to convey his acceptance of the reality of Climate Change.

    During his period in power significant progress was certainly made in terms of wind energy generation in the U.K., although it is unclear whether government policies facilitated this as opposed to technological advances, and the country’s favourable weather conditions. Cameron’s government certainly did not embark on any serious divestment from fossil fuels.

    He also displays little concern for biodiversity, bemoaning how the Environmental Agency ‘seemed to worry more these days about newts and butterflies than homes and livelihoods,’ and reveals support for badger culling as a means of combating bovine T.B..

    As Prime Minister he acknowledges an overriding consideration to maintain rising GDP, which is given almost aphrodisiacal qualities:

    When your GDP is on the up, your power rises with it. Your global stature increases, public confidence grows, your party’s fortunes rise, and your economy’s success sparks the interests of investors. Growth begets growth … But when GDP is stagnating or shrinking (or at least when you are told it is – the provisional figures don’t always turn out to be true), you’re in a permanent state of precariousness.

    Absent is any discussion of whether a politics predicated on economic-growth-without-end, involving intermittent recessions, is capable of generating any kind of environmental equilibrium for human beings living on planet Earth.

    Another aspect of Cameron’s Compassionate Conservative formula was the so-called ‘Big Society’, which called for a revival of volunteering. It is an idea not without merit – a non-remunerative space of interaction between private enterprise and the state – however easy it may be to satirise as a patrician fantasy world of village fetes and pumpkin-growing-competitions.

    An absence of engagement, however – in this book at least – with theories of social capital indicate, like much else about Compassionate Conservatism, that it is a veneer masking an overwhelming dedication to free market economics. This approach diverged from other northern European states, where living standards were generally maintained after the Crash.

    Referendum

    After becoming leader of the opposition in 2005, Cameron used his first PMQ, in which he was pitted against Tony Blair, to raise the failure of the Labour government to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Although he did not make a career of deriding the European project, his public utterances revealed suspicion throughout. Ultimately, pursuing a “small ‘e’ and small ‘s’ euroscepticism” agenda would make arguments in favour of the European project ring hollow.

    Nonetheless, having emerged with a successful result from the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, in part thanks to the intervention of his one-time sparring partner Gordon Brown, and the Alternative Vote in 2011, Cameron chose to take on the major challenge of an ‘in-out’ European referendum. He wished to settle the argument once and for all within the Conservative party, as the emergence of UKIP under the ‘charismatic’ Nigel Farage was threatening its right flank.

    In hindsight Cameron recognizes that he ‘had allowed expectations about what could be achieved through a renegotiation to become too high.’ But failure to control close lieutenants within Conservative ranks would be his ultimate undoing.

    Both Old Etonians and Oxford graduates, Johnson and Cameron were seen as fellow ‘Modernisers’ within Conservative ranks: ‘I liked Boris and he made me laugh.’ Cameron tells us, ‘But I didn’t always trust him.’ He provides an amusing picture of an occasional tennis partner: ‘Boris’s style on the court is like the rest of his life: aggressive, wildly unorthodox (he often uses an ancient wooden racquet) and extremely competitive.’

    This aggression appeared to border on lunacy at times, as when, on one Johnson family visit to the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, in a highly competitive game of football on the front lawn, Boris slide-tackled one of his own children, ‘so vigorously they had to retire hurt.’

    As Mayor of London Cameron says, ‘Boris was the one who was full of jealousies and paranoias.’ At one time he informed Cameron that after the end of his second spell as Mayor he would finish with public life altogether: ‘I’m leaving public life after this. People say I want to be an MP. I don’t. I’m not going to do that.’

    In the event Johnson resumed his parliamentary career, and when it came to the referendum he initially dithered – by his own admission ‘veering all over the place like a broken shopping trolley’ – before deciding to give the Leave campaign his wholehearted backing.

    We gain insights into what appears to be almost a domestic drama as Cameron reveals how prior to this decision Boris’s wife Marina, ‘rather effectively shouted him down, saying ‘Dave’s thought it through. I’m not sure you have. Why don’t you let the prime minister get on with it?’ – or words to that effect.’ Apparently fixated on the issue of the supremacy of EU law, Johnson consoled himself that ‘Brexit would be crushed like the toad beneath the harrow.’

    In a rare moment of insight Cameron intuits his opponents’ motivations: ‘Whichever senior Tory politician took the lead on the Brexit side – so loaded with images of patriotism, independence and romance – would become the darling of the party. He didn’t want to risk someone else with a high profile – Michael Gove in particular – to win that crown.’

    foam-flecked Faragist

    Ironically, Cameron himself persuaded the Sunday Times journalist, and fellow Oxford graduate, Michael Gove to seek a parliamentary seat. Gove went on to serve as a reform-minded Education Secretary during Cameron’s first administration, and turned out to be a star turn at Cabinet meetings: ‘He’d link together two stories of the day, something from popular culture, something from the other side of the world, and then deliver it with Carry On campness.’

    What Cameron regards, however, as the poisonous influence of his advisor Dominic Cummings brought disputes with the teaching profession, and in a reshuffle Gove was demoted to Chief Whip, with a diminished income. This rankled with Gove’s wife the journalist Sarah Vine at least, who ominously described a ‘shabby day’s work which Cameron will live to regret.’

    Although in Cameron’s estimation Gove, unlike Johnson, was a true Brexit believer, he had counselled against holding a referendum, and indicated he would only play a minimal role in the campaign. So the ‘ferocity and mendacity’ of his (and Johnson’s) tactics arrived as a shock. Dismissal of experts along with false claims about expenditure on the NHS came with anti-immigrant invective: ‘Michael Gove, the liberal-minded, carefully considered Conservative intellectual, had become a foam-flecked Faragist warning that the entire Turkish population was about to come and live in Britain.’

    Cameron reveals wounds of betrayal when he says that both Gove and Johnson, ‘behaved appallingly, attacking their own government, turning a blind eye on their side’s unpleasant actions and becoming ambassadors for the expert-trashing, truth-twisting age of populism.’

    End of days

    The referendum result left Cameron with little choice but to resign, plunging the country into an enduring constitutional crisis. The crocodile-tear-stained-text he received from Johnson is worth recalling: ‘Dave, I am sorry to have been out of touch but couldn’t think what to say and now I am absolutely miserable about your decision. You have been a superb PM and leader and the country owes you eternally.’

    One conclusion is that Cameron was a political lightweight who simply merged New Labour’s techniques in political spin with old school monetarist Thatcherite (or ‘Thatcherist’) economic policies. This may have been conducive to economic growth, with the U.K. emerging as an employment powerhouse in the wake of the Crash, attracting hundreds of thousands of workers from more sluggish European economies that generally afforded greater labour protection. But the uncertainties of boom and bust seem to have demanded scapegoats in the shape of immigrants, leaving the country vulnerable to a populist surge.

    The poverty of Cameron’s ideas is revealed in a paradoxical attitude towards monarchy:

    I have always been a passionate monarchist, but never able to explain precisely why. A person’s future should be determined by their talent and hard work, not by the accident of their birth – my whole political life has been dedicated to that meritocratic ideal.

    Also, reliance on the spectacle of the London Olympics to relieve social tensions is oddly reminiscent of Ancient Rome: ‘They seemed to be an antidote to so much that was wrong in our country. To the social breakdown we’d seen in the riots, proof that young people were a positive force.’

    And yet, despite his obvious deficiencies, foreign misadventures (including Libya) and shameful disregard for poverty, one cannot help feeling a certain nostalgia for his period in office. Then at least the Rule of Law seemed assured and the “rough edges” of conservatism were considered problematic.

    For the Record by David Cameron, William Collins, London, 2019.

    [i] Sonia Purnell, ‘Boris Johnson and David Cameron: How a rivalry that began at Eton spilled out on to the main stage of British politics’, February 23rd, 2016, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-and-david-cameron-how-a-rivalry-that-began-at-eton-spilled-out-on-to-the-main-stage-of-a6891856.html

    [ii] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Knopf Canada, Toronto, 2007.

    [iii] Eurostat, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20180426-1

    [iv] Untitled, ‘UK productivity continues lost decade’, April 5th, 2019, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195

    [v] May Bulman, ‘Food bank use in UK reaches highest rate on record as benefits fail to cover basic costs’, 24th of April, 2018, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/food-bank-uk-benefits-trussell-trust-cost-of-living-highest-rate-a8317001.html

  • ‘Economic theory changes one funeral at a time’ – An Interview with Warren Mosler on the True Nature of Money

    It’s the grease that makes the economic wheels turn. But ask where your taxes go after you pay them; or how a bank makes a loan; or what it means when you hear central banks are ‘printing money,’ and you’ll get different answers depending on who you talk to.

    Why should you care? Because a grasp of how the modern monetary system works is essential to understanding everything that has to do with money – from government austerity and stimulus spending, and everything in between.

    Warren Mosler spent much of his life attempting to understand what modern money is, what drives its circulation, and how the internal ‘plumbing’ of the modern monetary system sits together.

    What he discovered is a stranger picture than you would imagine. A word of warning, Mosler’s views on modern money are highly unconventional, running contrary to just about every economics textbook.

    Q&A with Warren Mosler

    Chris Lowe (CL): for readers who might not already know, CNBC calls you ‘one of the brightest minds in finance.’ You regularly comment on monetary matters and you’ve written two ground-breaking books on fiat money: Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, and Soft Currency Economics. But you’re about the furthest thing from an armchair theorist anyone can imagine.

    You started your career in retail banking in the early 1970s, going on to work at Wall Street broker Bache & Co., at Bankers Trust, and at Chicago investment bank William Blair & Co. Then, in 1982, you cofounded your own investment fund, Illinois Income Investors (III).

    It was a spectacular success. III had only one loss-making month in the 15 years you were at the helm. And financial newsletter MARHedge ranked it No.1 in the world through 1997, when you left.

    Later, you even developed your own automobile line, Mosler Automotive. (Star Wars director George Lucas was the first to take delivery of one of his models – a supercharged, intercooled, V-8 supercar, the MT900S.)

    And finally, you’re a pioneer in a new field of economics called Modern Money Theory (MMT)[i] that’s making big ripples in academia and on the policy level.

    So, what first got you interested in business and Finance?

    Warren Mosler (WM): The first thing was just getting out of school and going to work. I went to work in a small savings bank in my home state of Connecticut. That was probably my first interest – working in money and understanding how it works and how it doesn’t work.

    CL: You have a BA in economics. But you’re largely self-taught. Can you remember any economics books that made a big impression on you?

    WM: I read very little. But I read one of John Kenneth Galbraith’s books in the 1960s. I liked the idea that the world understands things one way when in fact it’s another way – which is what he was talking about. I used to take apart watches to try to figure out how they worked. I was that kind of kid.

    CL: MMT describes the day-to-day realities of using government-backed tokens as money instead of gold or some other commodity. Is it fair to call MMT the study of the fiat money system?

    WM: It’s the study of how any monetary system works. There’s quite a good level of understanding of how the gold standard worked, but almost no understanding of how a fiat system works. That’s why MMT has gotten that kind of attention.

    CL: Up to 1971, the world economy was on the gold standard. Foreign central banks could still, theoretically at least, convert their dollar reserves into gold. And foreign currencies were exchangeable for dollars at a fixed price.

    Since 1971, the supply of dollars is no longer linked to the supply of gold. And currencies ‘float’ against one another, based on supply and demand.

    Why did the system change?

    WM: No one goes off the gold standard because it’s working so well. We go off it during war, when it’s in the way of funding military spending, or during depressions, because it breaks down horribly. That’s what happened in the U.S. Most people forget. But we first exited the gold standard during the Great Depression.

    CL: What led to that first break with gold?

    WM: A good starting point is the Panic of 1907. That was a very bad gold-standard depression. The whole money system pretty much went down. And it got bailed out by a consortium of private banks led by J.P. Morgan.

    After 1907, Congress decided we needed to have a central bank – the Federal Reserve – so that this would never happen again. And in 1913, it passed the Federal Reserve Act. This created the Federal Reserve System, America’s central bank.

    Then, sure enough, in 1929, it happened again… we got another gold-standard depression. The idea that these gold-standard panics wouldn’t happen again with a central bank didn’t work.

    In 1933, about half of the commercial banks in the U.S. were closed. They were insolvent. In 1934, they reopened off the gold standard and with deposit insurance. And there’s never been a gold standard-type panic since.

    [In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Gold Reserve Act. This limited the ability to convert dollars at a fixed exchange rate to gold to foreign central banks. It also revalued gold from $20 an ounce to $35 an ounce.]

    It was going off the gold standard in 1934 – not the creation of the Fed – that prevented the kind of depressions we used to have. But they left the Fed there. Somebody had to vote on interest rates. So they just left it there.

    CL: What was the trigger in 1971?

    WM: Under the gold standard, the government would buy or sell gold – $35 an ounce was the most recent price they did that at. It was also supposed to be making sure it had sufficient gold reserves to back the dollars in circulation. But it didn’t…

    A lot of people see 1971 as the big change in our monetary system. But we’ve really been ‘off gold’ since 1934. Of course, it wasn’t until 1971 – when France asked to convert its growing pile of dollar foreign exchange reserves into gold – that we went off the gold standard officially.

    But if France had asked for the gold in 1935, we probably would have said no and formally gone off gold then. But I don’t know that. I’m just musing on what happened.

    CL: So why do we all value paper money if there’s nothing tangible backing it?

    WM: American economist Hyman Minsky used to say that anyone could print money… it’s a question of having somebody accept it and give you something in exchange. If I print my own ‘money’ and try to buy something with it, why would you sell me something? If I come with a bunch of raffle tickets, and there’s no prize, why would you buy them?

    CL: I see your point. Why is there demand for fiat money, then, if it has no intrinsic value?

    WM: Let’s start at the beginning… The government wants to provision itself. It wants soldiers. It wants a legal system. It wants to move goods and services that are currently in the private sector to the public sector.

    How does it get them there? How does it move people from the private sector to the public sector?

    Well, it could take slaves in a war and force them to do things for it. That used to be common. The British used to go into bars at night and hit people on the head and drag them out. They’d wake up in the morning on a ship in the Royal Navy.

    There are different ways to get people out of the private sector and into the public sector. We pretend to be more civilized. The first thing we do is impose a tax on something that nobody has, such as U.S. dollars.

    So, imagine, on day one, George Washington says, ‘Okay. There is this new thing called the U.S. dollar. And everybody owes me $100 in taxes. Or else you’ll lose your house or something.’

    Of course, nobody has any dollars. What are they supposed to do to get them?

    So, Washington says, ‘I’ll pay you $30,000 to serve in the Continental Army.’ Or, ‘I’ll pay your $10,000 for a new road.’ Or, ‘I’ll pay you $5 for a chicken.’

    The government imposes a tax on something nobody has. Then it imposes a penalty for nonpayment of that tax. This creates what we call ‘unemployment’ – people looking for paid work that pays in that currency. Unemployment is not people looking for volunteer work at the American Cancer Society. They’re looking for money.

    The reason we’re all working for U.S. dollars is because there is this incessant liability – this drain out of the economy – we call taxation. This creates a shortage of dollars. People are constantly faced with the need for dollars to pay off their tax liabilities.

    Without tax payments at the end of the chain, fiat money loses its value. For instance, when the Civil War ended, the South didn’t collect taxes anymore. And the value of Confederate currency went to zero. It kept a million men in the field for five years. But it lost its value when the South could no longer collect taxes effectively. Or take somewhere like Lebanon. When tax collection ceased there, the currency stopped having any value.

    CL: So money is an invention of the state… a government technology, if you like?

    WM: I think John Maynard Keynes used to say, ‘The government writes the dictionary.’ The Japanese government taxes in yen. So, they have yen. Sterling is what you need to pay taxes in Britain. And so on.

    What’s interesting is that any government that issues its own currency has to spend money first before it can collect it back in tax. It also has to spend money first before it can borrow it back. When a government that issues its own currency borrows, it’s actually just borrowing back money it just spent.

    I was in Pompeii, in Italy, about two months ago. The guide was saying, ‘Here are the coins we found. The government would collect the coins and then it would spend the money on infrastructure. Because people wanted Pompeii to be a nice place to live.’

    And I said, ‘Well, they spent the coins first and then collected them.’

    And he goes, ‘No, no, no. They collect the coins in taxes first. And then they spent them.’

    I asked him, ‘Where did the coins come from?’

    ‘The government made them.’

    ‘Okay. How did anybody get them?’

    ‘You’re saying they had to spend them first and then tax?’

    I said, ‘Yeah, what else could they do?’

    ‘I don’t know.’

    He was very confused…

    CL: Most people think the government needs to collect dollars – either through taxes or borrowing – before it can spend.

    WL: First, the government credits bank accounts when it spends. Then, it debits bank accounts when it taxes. You can’t debit an account first. That’s an overdraft – a negative balance. And a negative balance is a loan from the guy who allowed the negative balance: the government.

    That would mean the government loaned the money first before it collected it for tax, which doesn’t make sense. As a simple accounting logic, you can’t debit an account without crediting it first.

    What I’m telling you is known by all the senior staffers at the Fed. The way they say it is: You can’t do a ‘reserve drain’ without a ‘reserve add.’ They all know this. There’s nothing esoteric, or new, or secret about it. It’s how they function every day.

    None of this stuff is really subject to any dispute. Some people don’t like it. Or they can’t reconcile it with what they’ve heard. But they can’t dispute it, either.

    CL: One thing that shocked me – I think it was in your book Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy – is that if you paid the IRS in cash for your taxes, they’d give you a receipt for your money and then shred the dollars.

    WM: Well, the IRS doesn’t shred it. It gives it to some other agency that does the shredding. But yes – that’s what happens.

    CL: Why doesn’t the government take those dollars and recycle them back into the system?

    WM: If you pay them with old $20 bills, they’ll just throw them away. If you pay with new $20 bills, they may give them back to the banks. But today, it’s easier to give banks money off the new pile when they want it – it’s all wrapped up and nice and everything – than it is to take somebody’s old money with germs on it and try to wrap it up again.

    It’s like selling tickets to a football game. Would you collect all the old tickets and try to reuse them? Or would you just tear them up and throw them away? It’s easier to just take them off the new roll than it is to collect them all and then try to sell them again. And nobody would ever think a football stadium should collect the tickets before it sells them.

    CL: Then why does the government tax?

    WM: The government has to have tax liabilities. Otherwise, nobody would be a seller of goods and services. Nobody would be selling labor or food or whatever else the government wants. Nobody would be looking for jobs that pay in dollars if there wasn’t a tax. So, the government has to tax to create the basic need for its currency.

    CL: And why does the government borrow?

    WM: The government used to borrow because, when it spent dollars, those dollars were convertible into gold. It didn’t want people being able to take all the gold out of Fort Knox. So, it sold Treasury securities. This borrowed back the dollars for a certain amount of time.

    A Treasury is a one-year, or two-year, or ten-year security, or whatever. If you swapped your dollars for a Treasury security, you couldn’t get the dollars again to get the gold for one year, two years, or ten years.

    This kept people’s hands off the government’s gold supply. And it stabilized the gold in Fort Knox. The purpose of borrowing was to keep that money from being able to convert itself into gold right away. You had to wait until your Treasury security matured first.

    Since 1934, that reason is gone. But the government keeps borrowing anyway. It had the appearance at the time that you were borrowing to be able to spend. That’s an easy stance to perpetuate. So, they perpetuated it.

    CL: Under the gold standard, government borrowing competed with private sector investment. Money was a scarce commodity. It could either go into government borrowing or into private sector investment. People worried that government borrowing ‘crowded out’ private investment. Is that still a worry?

    WM: So, you have government spending first. When the government spends dollars, it puts them in a bank’s reserve account at the Fed. If the government decides to borrow back those dollars, it just shifts them from its reserve account to another account it has at the Fed called a securities account. They give them fancy names. They call them reserve accounts and securities accounts. But they’re really just checking and savings accounts.

    The government creates new dollar balances. It puts them in one type of account. Then it shifts those dollar balances to another type of account. We call that ‘government debt.’

    CL: You say governments need to run budget deficits and that budget surpluses can be disastrous for the economy. Can you explain what you mean by that?

     

    WM: Sure. Let’s say the government runs a budget surplus, which means it taxes more than it spends. That means it’s draining money out of people’s bank accounts. Eventually, this would empty people’s accounts.

    The U.S. has had seven depressions. All seven followed the only seven budget surpluses in history. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

    A government deficit, on the other hand, happens because the government spends more than it taxes. This net spending adds money into people’s bank accounts. This may cause inflation. But nobody is going to run out of money because of it.

    CL: Again, most people see it differently. For instance, at the end of the 1990s, President Clinton took the U.S. into a budget surplus. Why did he do that, if it was so bad for the economy?

    WM: The way Robert Eisner, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, used to tell the story was that he was at the Clinton White House explaining to the president that running a budget surplus was draining money out of the economy… and that it was going to cause a crash. And Clinton said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, Bob. But this is not about economics. It’s about politics.’

    Some people understand it. Some people don’t. In 2003, I was in the White House having a conversation with President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card. The economy was bad. Low interest rates weren’t working. And I told him more or less the same thing I’m telling you – that we needed a much larger deficit. In other words, we needed to either lower taxes or increased public spending.

    Card was a quick study. He’s an engineer. He got it. And he asked, ‘By how much?’

    I said, ‘About $700 billion.’ Which, back then, was a large number.

    ‘We don’t have much time, do we?’ he asked.

    I said, ‘No.’

    I wasn’t a Bush supporter or anything. But he was the president, and the economy wasn’t doing so well. A week later, Bush made an interesting statement. When he was asked about the deficit, he said, ‘I don’t look at numbers. I look at jobs.’

    He passed every spending bill he possibly could. He also got through every possible tax cut. Six months later, the deficit was about $200 billion for the quarter, which was about $800 billion for the year. The economy had turned around. And it didn’t cost Bush his second term.

    From time to time, there are people who understand how the system works enough to make intelligent comments about it and, in the case of Andrew Card, to do something about it. But then it kind of fades away.

    CL: One important thing that MMT predicted was that quantitative easing (QE) would not lead to runaway consumer price inflation, as many people feared. The idea you heard – and you still hear – a lot was that central banks were ‘printing money.’ And that this money was going to flood the economy and cause inflation… or even hyperinflation. But we’ve had seven years of global QE. And this still hasn’t happened. Why hasn’t QE led to consumer price inflation?

    WM: It depends how you define ‘money.’ The government is ‘printing money’ only under a very narrow definition of money supply.

    If you have your money in a checking account, and I have my money in a savings account, it’s not like you have money and I don’t. But when the government looks at the money supply, it counts the dollars in checking accounts – reserve accounts – as ‘money.’ But it doesn’t count the dollars in savings accounts – Treasury securities – as ‘money.’

    All central banks do under QE is buy somebody’s savings account and pay for it by putting money in their checking account. People say, ‘We’re adding to the money supply. We’ve added $4 trillion to the money supply.’

    But if you count the dollars in both accounts as money – like you’d count the dollars in your checking and savings accounts as money – nothing has changed. All that’s happened is people decided they’d rather the extra liquidity of a checking account instead of having a savings account, because the interest rate on their savings account was so low.

    QE just moved money from savings accounts to checking accounts. Somehow, central banks thought that was going to cause spending, and inflation, to rise. But it didn’t.

    CL: You refer to them as ‘checking accounts,’ but what exactly are bank reserves?

    WM: Reserves are just investments banks have at the Fed. They give the Fed money and earn a quarter of a percentage point [0.25%] in interest. Reserves are a liability of the Fed… and they’re a bank’s asset. It’s just like when a bank loans you money – the loan is your liability and the bank’s asset.

    CL: Why won’t banks ever lend their reserves to their customers?

    WM: Reserves are just assets that banks own. They’re loans to the Fed. People have that backward. You don’t loan out assets. There is no such thing.

    CL: So, how do banks make loans in the modern monetary system? I think there’s a lot of confusion over this point…

    WM: It’s simple. Banks make loans anytime they can find somebody to pay them more interest than their cost of funds. If a bank’s cost of funds is 0.25%… and it can lend to a big corporation at 1%… it’ll do it. It’ll make what’s called a ‘spread.’ Banks just try to make a spread against their cost of funds. It’s not about having money or not having money.

    Let’s say you go into your bank and borrow $100,000. You sign for the loan. The bank creates $100,000 that didn’t exist before and puts it in your account. But it’s not the bank’s money. It’s your money.

    The new money doesn’t belong to the bank that loaned it into existence. People act as though the banks are creating money for themselves. They’re not. Whoever borrows the money is the one who gets it, not the bank.

    CL: Andy Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England, recently gave a speech in which he talked about banning physical cash and then imposing negative interest rates on bank deposits to stimulate growth. Cash would allow you to escape the negative interest rates on bank deposits because you could always just put it under the mattress or whatever. So, Haldane also proposed banning cash to make negative interest rates more effective. Is that a good way to stimulate economic growth, in your view?

    WM: First, central bankers have got the interest rate thing backward. They think lowering rates will somehow stimulate the economy. But negative interest rates are just a tax. You start off with a certain amount of money – say, $100. If the rate is negative 1%, then you have $99 at the end of a year.

    How is taking money away from me supposed to stimulate the economy?

    CL: Aren’t central bankers channeling Keynes? As I understand it, they believe that seeing your money disappear like that will make you rush out and spend.

    WM: Right. But if you’re trying to save for retirement, all of a sudden you’ve got to save a lot more money because you’ve got a lot less income. Isn’t there some theory that says when people’s money goes away, and they have less, they spend less?

    CL: At what point do central bankers admit that lower interest rates aren’t working? Or do they just keep doubling down on something that’s clearly not working?

    WM: Somebody once said that economic theory changes one funeral at a time. Nobody really changes their minds. You’ve got to have somebody new coming in.

    This interview was conducted in 2014.

    [i] Peter Coy , Katia Dmitrieva and Matthew Boesler ‘Warren Buffett Hates It. AOC Is for It. A Beginner’s Guide to Modern Monetary Theory,’ Bloomberg, 21st of March, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-21/modern-monetary-theory-beginner-s-guide

  • NARLI: Independent Music Worth More Than Money

    A hegemonic, neoliberal logic based upon competition, exploitation, and inequality appears to have largely supplanted democratic principles of community, interdependence, and solidarity. The National Association of Record Labels of Ireland (NARLI) is significant in this context – founded in 2016 to further independent music in Ireland by forging a co-operative, community involved in its production – their work is both a means of challenging and resisting the dominant cultural ideology of our times. In this era of digital media saturation shaped by the prevalent cultural hegemony – playing, producing, talking, and thinking about music in an independent manner is vital.

    The NARLI moniker alludes to the work these labels engage with in this respect – gnarly in the sense of being ‘difficult, dangerous, or challenging’ and also, ‘excellent’. Their Annual General Music (AGM) event took place at the Irish Music Rights Organisation HQ, Dublin on 11 October – including a ‘sonic meeting’ featuring some of Ireland’s finest composers and musicians across a broad spectrum of music: contemporary classical, early music, electronica, folk and popular song, improvisation, Irish and traditional music from around the world, and jazz. The intersubjective and organic musical performance that resulted drew together artists representing the respective outputs of Diatribe Records, Ergodos, Heresy Records, Raelaech Records, and Improvised Music Company.[1]

    Listen to an exclusive recording below via our YouTube channel:

    After the AGM event, Eric Fraad (Heresy Records), Nick Roth (Diatribe Records), and Garrett Sholdice (Ergodos) gave their insights into the state of play for independent music-making in Ireland and further afield:

    ERIC FRAAD, HERESY RECORDS

    How would you explain the work of Heresy Records to someone who isn’t familiar with independent music?

    Heresy is an Irish-based internationally distributed art music label that curates and produces recordings in multiple genres including classical, contemporary classical, early music, world music, electronica, folk and a fusion of these styles. Being headquartered in Dublin we work with many Irish-based composers, singers and instrumentalists. We are known for unusual programming and surprising, original and sometimes provocative artwork.

    Our album The Wexford Carols, the first recording of Ireland’s greatest Christmas music reached #1 on the Billboard and Amazon charts and featured Caitríona O’Leary, Tom Jones, Rosanne Cash, Rhiannon Giddens, Dónal Lunny and many others. 

    Upcoming releases include The Red Book of Ossory – a new ensemble with Caitríona O’Leary, Deirdre O’Leary, Nick Roth and Francesco Turrisi – which fuses medieval music, jazz and contemporary classical in a unique and compelling way; The Richter Scale, a new composition by Berlin composer Boris Bergmann written for the concert pianist Ji Liu and the Steinway D Spirio/r, the world’s finest high-resolution player piano (Heresy and Steinway are premiering the work on 20 November at Steinway & Sons in London); Strange Wonders, The Wexford Carols Volume II produced by Ethan Johns and starring Caitríona O’Leary, Clara Sanabras, Seth Lakeman, Alison Balsom, Olov Johannson, John Smith, the choir Stile Antico and several others. 

    Caitriona O’Leary and Eric Fraad representing Heresy Records at the NARLI AGM. Photograph by Costantino Idini (c).

    What are the major challenges facing independent record companies presently? What is the most rewarding part of this work?

    Money, money, money and money! The bottom has fallen out of the independent art music recording industry which is no longer viable as a profitable business – meaning investors will not see their money back, revenue is too small to pay a reasonable staff, fund regular business functions or support strategic development plans. In fact, it is no longer a business in any legitimate sense of the word, and I’ve considered restructuring the label as a non-profit or charity which is actually what it is. That said, the creation and production of beautiful, surprising and meaningful recordings which give people around the world great pleasure and powerful experiences is still extremely rewarding. 

    How do you envision the future of independent music locally and globally?

    There is more music available and being created today than at any prior point in history and people’s appetites for diverse styles of music is voracious and unabated. This is true both locally and globally. Most of this output and activity is fueled, distributed and supported by the independent sector of the industry which is more available and risk-taking than the majors. Issues of quality of the music (which is subjective) and the untenable economic model (which is objective) aside the future for independent music is loud and bright.

    Sailog Ní Cheannabháin and Neil Ó Loclainn from Raelach Records at the NARLI AGM. Photograph by Costantino Idini (c).

    NICK ROTH, DIATRIBE RECORDS

    Can you describe how Diatribe operates as an independent record label?  

    We describe Diatribe as Ireland’s leading independent record label for new sounds… which is admittedly, unforgivably disrespectful of all the other leading independent Irish record labels for new sounds, all of whom are also making some amazing music right now and who happen to be our very good friends. At Diatribe, we focus on the recording and production of music that we think needs to be heard, aiming to constantly diversify our catalogue and do new things. There is just so much great music in Ireland, and in the world, and never enough time.

    What kinds of challenges are independent record companies facing at the present moment? What keeps you motivated in the face of these obstacles?

    There are challenges on both a local and global level for the existence of an independent record label. The older (pre-digital) model is just no longer relevant in our wonderful neoliberal gig economy, particularly now that previous revenue streams (like sales) have essentially all but disappeared. Practically no record will make back its production costs these days, without recourse to the kind of marketing and promotional budgets that are paradigmatically impossible for non-corporate labels. The gap that has always existed between majors and independents is now an insurmountable chasm. Essentially, an independent record label just isn’t a very good business to be in any more, at least in a capitalist sense. Which is kind of why we love it.

    Audience and performers at the NARLI AGM 2019. Photograph by Costantino Idini (c).

    Ever since its invention, recording has proven an essential part of the musical ecosystem, and our relationship with technology has changed the way that we listen to the world. Right now, as an independent label founded in 2007, we are making more music than ever – really amazing records that we love everything about. We are proud and happy to be supporting the artists in their fight, against all odds, to make this music happen. What does that mean? I guess that music is worth more than money.

    What’s next for Diatribe?

    Our big news is that we are running a Diatribe stage at the New Music Dublin (NMD) festival in the National Concert Hall at the end of February 2020, where we will be launching seven new records across the weekend. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited we are about this wave of music coming out – it’s a huge milestone for us, and the culmination of several years work across three continents. Previously we have launched two sets of four records simultaneously as collections (Solo Series Phase I / II) and these were really exciting moments for the label, so NMD promises to be incredible. For us it’s really about bringing people together and creating a sense of community through mutual respect and shared inspiration.

    Cora Venus Lunny, Matthew Jacobson, Nick Roth, and Olesya Zdorovetska of Diatribe at the NARLI AGM. Photograph by Costantino Idini (c).

    GARRETT SHOLDICE, ERGODOS

    What kind of work is Ergodos engaged with?

    Ergodos is a record label and concert promoter based in Dublin. Benedict Schlepper-Connolly and I started Ergodos about thirteen years ago. We’re both composers, and I think, for both of us, curation and production have always felt like important components of our creative work. We share a very eclectic outlook, and we both believe in music as a potentially transformative and transcendent experience. Concentration, immersion and re-contextualization have been recurring themes for us. 

    We celebrated our thirtieth release earlier this year – Winter, a rich and poised classical chamber music set from Ficino Ensemble. Other titles range from curated projects inspired by J.S. Bach, medieval music,  and the art of song with “house band” Ergodos Musicians; to solo piano meditations by Simon O’Connor; to the delicate jazz-and-electronica-inflected ambiences of Seán Mac Erlaine, to portraits of acclaimed contemporary composers such as Christopher Fox and Kevin Volans; to traditional Irish music projects featuring fiddle player Frankie Gavin; and much else.

    We began as a music festival in Trinity College in 2006, and live music production has always been so important to us. Since then we have produced many events in Ireland, but also abroad in London, New York, Berlin and Amsterdam. In recent years, we’ve had the pleasure of presenting The Santa Rita Concerts – a series of music and wine evenings in the Little Museum of Dublin. These events have featured artists as diverse as British folk singer Chris Wood, Egyptian composer-vocalist Nadah El Shazly, sound artist Chris Watson, and cellist and Crash Ensemble director Kate Ellis. 

    Garrett Sholdice and Michelle O’Rourke of Ergodos perform at the NARLI AGM. Photograph by Costantino Idini (c).

    What are the rewards of running an independent label and production company? What is the main obstacle you face?

    Well, the reward is to bring what we feel are important documents into the world so that people can encounter them and – hopefully – be enriched. But the economic challenges of running an independent record label in 2019 are considerable. We feel that labels like us and the others in the NARLI alliance make an important contribution, also as a platform for musicians. Access to structural grant support would help to sustain our place in this rich ecosystem.

    How do you see the future of independent music?

    It’s very difficult to speculate about the future. The marketplace is saturated, yet it seems that the importance and potency of recorded music is not diminished. In such a crowded arena, perhaps more than ever the role of the curated, independent label is to offer distinctive, meaningful experiences – hand-selected art, rather than lifestyle soundtrack; music that invites sustained attention, regardless of format. 

    Garrett Sholdice, Michelle O’Rourke, and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly (There is an Island) performing at the NARLI AGM. Photograph by Costantino Idini (c).

    NARLI’s co-operative, considered organisation is salient in the face of the excesses of our predominantly precarious and unforgiving cultural operating system. As a forward-thinking, non-corporate entity, their shared interest is in sustaining a vibrant musical ecosystem allied to principles that extend beyond concerns with relentless competition and vapid consumption. As such, independence, interdependence, and inspiration are key to the work these labels encourage and support.

    As an association, NARLI facilitates the endeavours of musical artists to refashion and refresh existing traditions in forward-thinking and heterogeneous ways. And, as the ‘enlivening art’, music has a role to play in reflecting and shaping our experiences of the world – including personal and societal identities. The sum total of the activity represented by NARLI affords a view into how we, as artists and people, might exist together individually and collectively – with all our differences and specifics – to greater mutual benefit.

    NARLI AGM 2019 (left to right, top row): Cora Venus Lunny (Diatribe), Benedict Schlepper-Connolly (Ergodos), Garrett Sholdice (Ergodos), Olesya Zdorovetska (Diatribe), Nick Roth (Diatribe), Michelle O’Rourke (Ergodos), Caitriona O’Leary (Hersey), Eric Fraad (Heresy), Jack Talty (Raelach), Neil Ó Loclaínn (Raelach), Sailog Ní Cheannabháin,(Raelach); (left to right, bottom row): Aoife Concannon (IMC), Matthew Jacobson (Diatribe), Keith Lindsay (Diatribe), Oisín Ó Cualáin (Diatribe), Adam Nolan (IMC), Kenneth Killeen (IMC). Photograph by Costantino Idini (c).

    [1] Farpoint Recordings and DotDotDot Music are also members of NARLI but did not have representatives performing on the night.

  • Bull Moose – Climate Crisis to Opportunity

    As Washington swirls with the drama and intricacies of the impeachment enquiry, spare a thought for climate. Yes, our climate.  

    Much was written in Europe, and elsewhere, about the remarkable Greta Thurnberg. The effectiveness of her singular obsession with the issue – seemingly aided by an Asperger’s condition that leaves her unaffected by social cues that would deter most of us – caused a storm.  She was honest, impassioned, and right about the dire consequences awaiting our planet if we fail to take action. Yet, her message was also largely ineffective this side of the pond.      

    Not that she was a hypocrite, having made her way to the US on a solar-powered sailing boat. Everyone remembers Al Gore’s huge mansion powered by low wattage light bulbs.

    Just last month, the rich and famous made their way to Sicily by way of private jet and luxury yacht to discuss climate change. Really. It made for great headlines here in America: ‘further evidence of the liberal elite telling ‘us’ what to do, while abiding by a different set of rules…’ 

    For the host, Google, being tone-deaf in the climate debate counted for little. It was a lobbying effort.  Besides, compared to the Exxon Mobile’s of the world, at least they’re trying to do something.

    Even in America it’s apparent that the climate is accelerating faster than expected. Anecdotal evidence is piling up. In cities like Houston, Miami, Charleston, and San Francisco, historic rains, drought and storms are starting to sway public opinion. 

    In Atlanta this September more heat records were broken than any ever before. Even some Republicans – accustomed to towing the party line of sowing seeds of doubt about the cause of climate change – are beginning to acknowledge the changing conditions.

    This is a first step. As one ardent Trump supporter, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, put it bluntly: ‘I didn’t come to Congress to argue with a thermometer.’[i]

    Whether Republicans are prepared for real measures is another matter as, for many Americans, taking away an automatic right to a supercharged engine is akin to taking away their guns – not on your life.

    In this context, let’s examine how Greta was received in the US. While many praised her direct message and blunt language, not a single person we spoke to had actually changed their mind; while Fox News’s depiction – satirizing a Stephen King novel ‘children of the climate’ – generated lots of laughter, regardless of political conviction.

    Also, Greta Thunberg’s angry accusations against politicians, paradoxically, made them seem sympathetic by comparison. In America even a dagger to the back is often accompanied with a smile; in the political culture and day-to-day-life outward politeness is a constant, especially in the South, which is where most people need convincing about the human impact of climate change. 

    Maybe Greta’s speech at the UN swayed some young people, and gave momentum to environmentalists. But it did little to sway public opinion, define a clear strategy, or mark a way forward.

    So, with the oxygen sucked from the pages of the news by impeachment, how can real change be inspired in America?

    For America to take a leadership role on climate two things need to occur. First, Republicans, who make 30-40% of the national electorate, need to be convinced that this is an urgent priority. Currently a majority either think it’s a non-issue (outright denial), or that it should not be a priority. 

    Secondly, the issue needs to be reframed into one of opportunity, rather than as a daunting problem because of our past and current habits. This last point is often missed. America has thrived on being a nation of opportunity. Obama got elected on the back of a message of hope; Trump on a ticket of change to the status quo.

    When it comes to climate, we are far more adept at talking in terms of catastrophes than we are at talking up opportunities. Perhaps it is because obvious solutions simply don’t exist, or perhaps it’s the size of the task appearing too big. 

    Yet for there to be real action this issue needs to be reframed. Environmentalists should stop trying to inspire fear, and instead talk in terms of opportunity, disruption, innovation, the American Dream, leadership – appeal to America’s pride rather than guilt. And perhaps remember that the Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity! Taking on board this message is key to winning the next election.

    [i] Rebecca Beitsch and Miranda Green, ‘GOP lawmaker parodies Green New Deal in new climate bill’April 4th, 2019, The Hill, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/437244-gop-lawmaker-introduces-viable-alternative-to-green-new-deal

  • Lament for Áirt Uí Laoire

    In August of  1969 I was driving across Ireland with the late Bearnard Ó Riain, the older brother of a good friend of mine, the late Dinno Ryan. Most of my old friends are now ‘late’.

    We were going to join others in a mountain-walking weekend. Bearnard had participated in the nineteen-fifties IRA campaign in the North of Ireland, was captured and interned in the Curragh. He could not stand being locked up and he signed a statement renouncing his involvement in the IRA and undertaking to leave Ireland. He had gone to Africa, married an English girl named Carol, had two children and spent the next ten years there. The marriage had broken up and he was now back in Ireland to gather his resources.

    I switched on the car radio to get the news and we heard that the North had exploded again, that Orangemen were burning Nationalists out of their homes in Belfast.

    [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”3″ display=”basic_slideshow”]He turned to me with a look that said: ‘I have to go up there’. I knew that he needed some distraction from his domestic circumstance. I also suspected he needed to exorcise his old guilt at signing himself out of the IRA and I turned the car northwards.

    We arrived in Derry as the Rossville flats siege was ending. On the roof of the flats we met Bernadette Devlin. Bearnard asked her if we could help in any way. ‘You could help to clear up this mess,’ she said and we started clearing away the broken bottles and stones, remnants of Molotov cocktails.

    We found a bed for the night on the floor of RTE reporter Seán Duignan’s City Hotel bedroom. Word came that  there had also been serious trouble in Dungiven.  Seán was excited, predicting a civil war.

    Belfast

    The following morning we drove to Dungiven, which was now peaceful, recovering from a night of violence. It was all very anti-climactical. I later wrote an article which the Evening Press published with the title: ‘Trouble will always be where I am not.’

    The same applied to Belfast. The only sign that there had been trouble on Bombay Street was a lone figure whose bald head I recognised from newspaper photos as belonging to Joe Cahill. He was keeping guard with some kind of rifle.

    Bearnard and I acted like tourists and strolled up the ravaged street. Encountering some suspicious young men of whose allegiance we could not be sure we prudently claimed to be Canadian journalists. Our years of travelling had smoothed the rough edges of our Dublin accents so that we could pass ourselves off as harmless. 

    The following morning we investigated a burnt out factory on, I think, the Falls Road. Someone shouted ‘sniper’ and everybody dived for cover. I could not take it seriously and simply lined myself up behind a lamppost. If there actually was a sniper in the factory building, I reasoned, he would need to be a very good shot and at worst I could only be winged.

    But there were no shots. I was beginning to think the whole situation was quite exaggerated by journalists. Later that day we witnessed the first contingent of British soldiers taking up positions on the Falls Road and being applauded by the grateful citizens. What struck me was the nervousness of the lieutenant in charge and the gaucheness, the mystified expressions of the soldiers under his command.

    How were they – or we – to know that we were witnessing the beginnings of a Nationalist revolt and an occupation and vicious war that would dominate our island for the next thirty years?

    The above mentioned Bearnard O Riain lived in Johannesburg. He had written a most interesting memoir of his dramatic life. It opens with the scene of a drunken man kicking a woman lying in the gutter. To his horror, the writer realises that the woman is his wife and he himself is the violent drunk. Bearnard’s book is quite unlike my fanciful reminiscences. It is that unique object: a well-written, honest memoir. No publisher in Ireland was interested in publishing it.

    It would be five years before I again braved the North of Ireland, next time as  the guest of ‘Official’ Sinn Féin.

    Conamara

    By 1974 I was entrenched in a cottage in Baile na h-Abhann, Conamara where TG4 would be built over a score years later.

    A softly spoken man named Eamon Smullen called one day. He had the idea of making a film on the subject of the epic poem, Caoineadh Áirt Uí Laoire. It had been a favourite of mine in school. He could even offer some money to make it.

    I jumped at the chance. It took me six months to research, write and direct the film with an amateur cast entirely from the area. It took a few more months to edit and finish it. Essentially it was a tragic love story.

    The (true) context was a hopeless one-man protest against the Penal Laws imposed by the English in the 18th century. Joe Comerford and myself were the only crew with film experience, Joe on camera, myself on sound. My then wife Helen was the indispensable production support.

    When the film was finished, my neighbours – including the cast of the film – were a little bewildered by my quite unconscious use of Brechtian alienation techniques. This was a pragmatic solution to the problem of using an all-amateur cast. I needed to creep up on and defuse, audience prejudices against both amateurs and the Irish language.

    I did this by using authentic native speakers rather than urban Gaeilgeoirí and scripted it accordingly as an amateur rehearsal with roughly dramatic re-enactments. It worked very well because it offended the proper targets. When it was shown at the Savoy cinema in the Cork Film Festival, actors Niall Tóibín and Donal McCann happened to be seated behind me. At the end Niall tapped me on the shoulder and whispered: ‘Quinn, yer a clever hoor.’

    That was as fine a compliment as I could get and certainly took the sting out of the Irish Times’s Fergus Lenihan describing the film as ‘formless as the Connemara rocks.’

    Dermot Breen, Director of the Festival, was delighted to be offered the film – the only other Irish entry besides my friend Louis Marcus’s fine Waterford Glass job.

    Naturally I thought my baby was a work celebrating the genius of Conamara but, considering the pleasant expectations of film audiences, Louis’s beautiful cinematography won.

    Later, Dermot Breen who was double-jobbing as Irish Film Censor, demanded cuts to certain mild profanities in my English subtitles – e.g. ‘shit’ and ‘Jesus’. I refused and he confined the film to viewers over sixteen years. The Dublin premiere was launched by Síobhán McKenna in the Drumcondra Grand cinema in 1975 while I was having a quiet little breakdown.

    Dance Hall charge

    It also seemed a good idea to show it at the first night of our little ‘cinema’ in Carraroe in the same year. Although I was entirely to blame for the film the titles included a credit for the ‘Education Department of Sinn Féin’ of which Eamon Smullen was director and who had provided the £6000 towards its making.

    The war in the North was in full swing;  Sinn Féin was split into Provos’ and ‘Stickies’. I had no interest in either group, nor in the subtleties of North/South politics. All I saw was an opportunity to make a film about my favourite poem in Irish, which is still a landmark in Irish literary history.

    Oblivious to the political implications I went ahead with the job. But politicians have longer memories than their constituents. I had previously, on our closed-circuit video, made fun of the Minister for the Gaeltacht’s poor command of the language of the Gaeltacht. There were two political black marks against me.

    Thus on the night of the Carraroe showing of the film the local Garda arrived at the door asking to see my licence to show films. No such licence existed. The only legislation the State had ever bothered to enact concerning film was the Dance Hall Act of 1935. Nobody could dance in our cinema because the seats were bolted to the floor.

    The Garda, a decent man named Rice, mentioned the suspicion that  I was raising funds for the IRA!  I was summonsed to appear in court on the Dance Hall charge. It was a petty case of political harassment and the Garda was the messenger: don’t mess with the Minister, the message said.

    The Case for the Defence

    George Morrison of Mise Éire fame brought a sample of old flammable nitrate film as an exhibit in my defence. This was the dangerous stuff for which the British had legislated in 1904 and which had long fallen into disuse. 

    George intended to ignite an inch of it and detonate it in court as a smoke bomb – a game we had played as children. The demonstration would show the difference between it and the modern safety film which I handled.

    Perhaps fortunately, George did not get the chance as the case was summarily dismissed with no blot on my escutcheon. Nevertheless some of the mud stuck and forever afterwards I was considered locally to be somehow not politically kosher.

    Officially, I was bordering on the subversive. When some maverick IRA man named ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchy was being sought high and low throughout Ireland there were only three houses searched in Conamara. One of them was mine. The Special Branch found and formally confiscated a child’s popgun which did not work.

    Belfast drinking club

    President Cearrbhaill O Dálaigh had a private peek at the film in the Project Theatre in Dublin and wrote a complimentary note to me. Film critic Ciaran Carty had kindly described it as ‘the Irish film I for one have been waiting for.’

    But the film was not really respectable until the Northern war was over. It has never been shown on RTE but TG4 is more daring and have shown it twice. When Channel Four showed it they cut out the credits for Sinn Féin. Meantime Eamon Smullen wanted to show the film in a Republican drinking club in Belfast and brought Joe Comerford, cameraman, and myself up there. 

    The film also seemed to confuse that audience. A lady turned to us and asked: ‘What are yiz? Some kinda antellectuals?’ While we were there the club was raided by the British Army who moved silently and grimly through the crowd. 

    I found it strange that there was no heckling, not a voice raised in protest and deduced that, yes, there is something frightful happening in this part of Ireland.

    We were accommodated that night in the house of a man named Billy MacMillan whom I gathered had been shot by the rival Provisional IRA. In Ireland the first thing on the agenda is the split.

    I noticed a  man in the tiny back yard of the house carrying a revolver, presumably to protect us. It felt as if we were in a film. We were escorted to the eight-o’clock train the next morning by Eamon Smullen, the gentle man who had asked me to make the film.

    At no stage did I feel in danger. I think I must sleepwalk through life, incapable of  taking anything seriously, not even the darkness. All is at arm’s length. It still surprises me that

    Caoineadh Áirt Uí Laoire has become a kind of icon in the lexicon of Irish film making. In recent years it was exhibited for a month in Trinity’s Douglas Hyde Gallery. It was also featured in the Irish Museum of Modern Art as an example of the work of modern Irish artists.

    A couple of years ago it was restored and Joe Comerford and I showed it in Derrynane, the Kerry home of Daniel O’Connell’s family which features in the film. In the introduction I mentioned the film’s small budget.

    Poet Theo Dorgan was present and later in the pub said to me: ‘I know where that £6000 came from. I think I even know the post office from which it was stolen.’ I still hope he was joking.

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    Bob Quinn directed Poitín, the first feature film entirely in the Irish language, while his documentary works include the four-part Atlantean series tracing the origins of the Irish people. His recent memoir A Monk Manqué is being serialized in Cassandra Voices.

  • Poetry – Ben Keatinge

    Black Vulture

    You loom at Madzharovo
    then at Bosilovo
    roost at Kalanjevo.

    Black pilgrim
    cowl of the air
    crossing these skies,

    come, we are prone
    and torn, numbed,
    expecting your news.

    Cormorants at Dojran Lake

    The fisher Christs are drying their wings
    a great white pelican gawps
    and gives a wide September yawn
    a prudent heron heeds, and waits.

    The Tetovo Buzzards

    The Tetovo buzzards loop high and swoop low,
    they circle the plains across Tetovo,
    with the Vardar they bend, drift the ravines,
    wider and deeper, hunting in teams;
    the valleys are empty, the villages small,
    the fields unfenced and the minarets tall;
    did I hear one give a shriek-like ‘Shqip’
    when crossing the canyon next to Chiflik?
    Swinging from Saraj to Kumanovo
    they reckon the wind, climb as they go.

    Pelicans at Prespa Lake

    Some pelicans festoon the bay
    like summer boats at Howth or Bray
    here to forage, to fish
    and fly back across the spit
    like local geese as day grows late
    in Prespa or at Donabate
    who swoop on Sutton, or on Rush,
    then tail it to Achilleios.

    Benjamin Keatinge is a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His poetry has appeared in Orbis, Eborakon, The Galway Review, Agenda and Flare and is forthcoming in Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets (Dedalus Press, 2019). He is editor of Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (Cork University Press, 2019).

    Pictures by Hristo Peshev. Bulgarian conservationist and wildlife photographer who works as field work co-ordinator at the Fund for Wild Flora and Fauna, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria specializing in vulture conservation.

  • What Separates us from Monsters? Dylan Tighe’s Redubbing of Pasolini’s Saló

    Before even taking my seat, three times I was warned of the ‘gory content’ in Dylan Tighe’s redubbed rendition of ‘Salò’, or ‘120 Days of Sodom.’ Then announcements made at the start, noting our nearest fire exits, and the two-hour-and-ten minute performance length (sans interval), warned us again that we could leave at any time.

    Those familiar with Pasolini’s final film will understand that this performance is not for the faint hearted. Having run since last Thursday, it has received a critical Irish Times review claiming it abuses the relationship between spectator and performer by traumatising its audience.[i]

    But abuse, as we so brutally learn, is not something that can be left behind at the theatre door. Abuse is not a choice. And a choice we had – we were reminded of it four times. ‘120 Days of Sodom’ is not a new discovery, nor are the stories echoed from the Magdalene Laundries and Christian Brother schools. So, please be advised: if you think that you can’t handle it, then you probably can’t.

    Tighe has no interest in merely entertaining. He seems to have anticipated backlash, telling the Irish Examiner: ‘I was thinking about what it means to be outraged by a representation when there is not as much outrage, culturally, about the facts.’[ii] This is the general theme explored, and it is likely to provoke outrage. I even received a note from my editor afterwards saying: ‘I understand if you had to leave before it was finished.’

    On stage, chairs, small screens, bottled water and microphones are set up for the determined and brave cast. Centre stage, an Irish flag is placed on top of a filing drawer. The flag is later dropped on and discarded to access the files. Later, a European Union flag will be draped, notably when the death reports of young refugees are read out in a clinical and matter-of-fact tone.

    The film is given a new setting, Sligo – later there’s a nod to W.B. Yeats’s notorious line: ‘Base-born products of base beds’ – and our performers give us sound effects of whimpering, aggressive rape and sniggering, while a scattered script draws together a story based on the brutal scenes unfolding onscreen. Context is built from the verbatim accounts of clinical abuse stories. Parallels are easily and purposefully drawn.

    Perhaps the most shocking incident in the film is when a female adolescent is forced to eat the faeces of her abuser. More shocking is the link between that and an exact report of a priest admitting to demanding that a young boy lick faeces off his shoe. ‘I didn’t mean for him to actually do it,’ he says.

    Similar accounts are read throughout, oftentimes in upbeat and haughty tones. Tighe has scripted it so that many of the accounts are dubbed over an older, well-dressed courtesan in the film, assumed to signify a nun.

    I also questioned: what makes the older women exempt from abuse? Is it merely that they are past the age of abuse, or is it something deeper? Have they already endured something similar? One scene where an older lady is flouncing around in a manic way, and then flashes the crowd of male abusers, signifies the latter.

    I found myself waiting in anticipation for the accounts to be read out, for meaning to be given to the disturbing images and events onscreen. Although exercised intelligently, it could have made more sense to stick with one dominant theme: the sexual and physical abuse inflicted on thousands of children by members of the Catholic clergy.

    The list of deceased refugee adolescents was, nonetheless, more than moving, like many of the recollections. I cried silently in my seat. And, while I understand this was Tighe’s point – that this is not history, this is present day – it felt too ambitious. Hadn’t we suffered through enough already?

    I considered leaving around as many times as I was told that it would be OK if I had to do so. But I stayed. Perhaps because of a feeling that this was necessary. To bear witness to the brutality, to face it without a shield, to remove the mask on the truth.

    The play began with an introduction from Tighe himself, addressing the audience in Italian with subtitles onscreen. But one cannot simultaneously look at his facial expressions and read from the subtitles. A choice needs to be made. Similarly, towards the end, as the adolescent characters are shown being abused horrifically, smoke is released onstage, eventually covering the screen, leaving us back in a position of safety.

    This subtle occlusion served as a representation of our daily reality. By ‘our’ I really mean those of us who may not have suffered first-hand these harrowing crimes, but who have listened to many accounts. As a telephone counsellor volunteering in the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, I can say I have listened. I have acknowledged. I have heard stories such as those depicted on onstage. I also appreciated finding the Crisis telephone number listed on a laminated sign in the cubicles after the performance ended.

    Yet there was something different to this type of listening, something even more foul-tasting, which is a knowledge that these crimes have not been accounted for. These crimes have been covered up and excused. So much so that it falls to Tighe, and others, to recreate the trauma in order for us to face up to it.

    Understandably, this production is not for everyone. But the fact that such a production is being staged in the Abbey – the theatre of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory – is significant. An uncomfortable, unpleasant necessity – acting in a way like the Playboy of the Western World questioned other sides of the Irish character. This is why I did not leave.

    The performance explores consumption and an inability to satisfy that consumptive greed which seems to accompany positions of power. It led me to question our own present, overwhelming need to consume. The adolescents could easily stand in for how we exploit the Earth’s resources, how we abuse and ignore the plight of wildlife, farm animals – all in the name of perceived necessities that we assume to be needs.

    I don’t believe that it is Tighe’s intention to put blame on his audience. Rather, this production demands we ask ourselves ‘what separates us from monsters?’

    Feature Image: Luca Truffarelli 

    [ngg src=”galleries” ids=”2″ display=”basic_imagebrowser”][i] Ciara L. Murphy, ‘Pasolini’s Salò Redubbed review: Aims for greatness but falls significantly short’, September 30th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/pasolini-s-sal%C3%B2-redubbed-review-aims-for-greatness-but-falls-significantly-short-1.4034991

    [ii] Alan O’Riordain, ‘Classic 120 Days of Sodom redubbed for Irish context’, September 22nd, 2019, Irish Examiner, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/lifestyle/culture/classic-120-days-of-sodom-redubbed-for-irish-context-952326.html

  • Musician of the Month: Phil Christie | The Bonk

     

    A Digest

    For most of us, the stomach is positioned around our middle. In East-Asian cultures, this area is usually considered the seat of the subjective self – the centre, from which we extend outward towards the world. Closer to home, we usually think of ourselves as residing somewhere behind the eyes, perhaps at one of the busier junctions of brain fold. Testing both locations within myself for signs of existence, I’m most aware of a ‘self’ when something goes wrong; when things are going well, I don’t occur to myself at all.

    The solar plexus is where the feeling of danger registers whenever it appears I am under threat (emotionally or physically). This reaction happens in my guts before any wordthoughts have time to log the incident in my head. Recent scientific investigations show the extent of the neural network in and around the stomach, and lend credibility to the idea that we exist much more in our bellies than we think we do. I like this idea. It makes sense when I think about playing and writing music, and what can be considered ‘my own’ in any of it.

    The word ‘stomach’ traces back to stoma, a Greek word having the sense of a kind of mouth; an opening; an inlet or an outlet. Interestingly, the entire alimentary canal – oesophagus through to the large intestine – can be strictly considered external to our bodies from an anatomical perspective, in that it has openings at either end. If we consider the stomach as the seat of the self, we might concede that we exist outside ourselves in a certain way all the time. The ear is another stoma, another digestive organ, where voices are metabolized and absorbed into the nerve stream.

    I find the most enjoyment in making sounds when it lends strangeness to the experience of being. When you listen to another person or another thing, you’re initiated into another world, churned around in another belly. Within the transmission process, you are suspended between selves, with an ability to be inside and outside simultaneously, accessing all the feelings on both sides of the exchange.

    As you listen and digest the sounds you hear, you’re not only receiving – the ear also gives a voice to the other person or the other thing. Anytime I hear Roy Orbison sing ‘In Dreams’ now I can’t help but hear what David Lynch heard in the piece for Blue Velvet. His ear has edited what Roy Orbison and ‘his’ song are forever.

    All of this is a preface to my admission that I always find it difficult to write about what I do with music, ‘my own stuff’. I think everyone should find that difficult. I’m suspicious of those who don’t. There is a well-founded anxiety that comes with the notion of having a genre, image, piece of music, or slogan, represent you.

    Because when things are working well and when music is working well, there is no need to think about what you are doing. You shouldn’t be able to name it.

    The boundaries between what you hear and digest and what you try to say, or sound, are fluid and always shifting. Artists like R. Stevie Moore and Robert Wyatt, whose songs present a healthy digestion of the sounds and perspectives of others, for me always come out sounding the most original.

    This makes me reflect on the obsession we have with our selves, and also, the idea of eclecticism in music. Everyone wants to find what is unique and self-identical and unmixed and quintessential in themselves. The commodification and marketing of music propagates this obsession because in order to sell things, we need personalities, niches, geniuses, and so on. As a musical artist, distinguishing oneself from ‘the others’ through branding, imagery, sounds, and words is deemed crucial to being able to survive the Internet.

    I think it’s worth making the case for selflessness again. This is not to suggest that we don’t reflect on the place we occupy in the world; we might do well to recognise that the need to identify ourselves with any position is questionable and also very boring. The thing that is really interesting to me in all of this is the experience of not being anything, possessing no essential qualities, having nothing particularly special to speak of, and being fully content to tip on.

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    The Bonk play The Sound House on 11.10.19

    May Feign is available for free download here.